“Forty years!” an unusually boisterous Robert De Niro bellowed on Thursday night at the Beacon Theater, where he and Tribeca Film Festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal introduced a special anniversary screening of Martin Scorsese’sTaxi Driver.

“Every day for 40 fuckin’ years at least ONE of you has come up to me and said . . . what do you think?”

“Let’s say it together now,” De Niro continued, half-kidding, half-wishing to exorcise the phrase from everyone’s tongue. The audience took its cue.

“Are you talking to ME?” a capacity crowd of 3,000 or so asked in unison.

“Good, now you don’t have to laugh when you hear it in the movie.”

Despite De Niro’s best efforts, many in the crowd still couldn’t stifle a laugh when De Niro’s Travis Bickle looked into the mirror to delivered that unforgettable line. But it was a rare instance of unintentional laughter in the still mesmerizing, Palme d’Or-winning portrait of madness and urban loneliness. When the film concluded (after much bloodshed from legendary effects wizard Dick Smith and the swirling, brassy score from Bernard Herrmann), there was more levity when members of the cast and crew appeared onstage for a brief post-screening chat.

Led by critic, documentarian and director of the New York Film Festival programmer Kent Jones (a nice détente between the uptown and downtown Manhattan movie fests), leading man De Niro was joined by Scorsese; the film’s writer, Paul Schrader; producer Michael Phillips; and co-stars Jodie Foster_, Cybill Shepherd, and Harvey Keitel.

De Niro, who usually spends any time answering questions looking as though he’d prefer undergoing anesthesia-free oral surgery, was engaged and chipper sitting next to his old pal Marty. Maybe there’s a reason they’ve made eight films together. The actor spoke about how they decided that Bickle should wear a mohawk for the film’s final scenes after looking at photos from a friend of theirs who was a special forces soldier “halo jumping into Laos.” He was concerned, though, because he had to go shoot Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon soon thereafter, so they fitted him in a bald cap. “As he was being fitted,” Scorsese recalled, “I nodded off in my chair. I felt a tap on my arm, open my eyes and was scared to death!”

*Taxi Driver’*s relatively low-budget shoot came at a time when nearly everyone in involved were in high demand after years of circling major breakthroughs, but they’d all been attached for some time, even as they worked on other products (like De Niro’s Academy Award-winning turn in The Godfather: Part II.)

“The talent stuck with the project until it became a bargain,” Phillips recalled, explaining why the studio would roll the dice on such a chancy story. Scorsese said the vibe before shooting was “let’s just get this done for God’s sake!”

Even though Bickle is such a rich, complex character (a “walking contradiction,” as Shepherd’s Betsey says over coffee and pie), the star, director, and writer didn’t have too many “long existential discussions” about him, De Niro said. “We didn’t talk about the script because we all knew that guy,” Schrader added. “We were three young men.”

Four decades later, he said, the film still has “a purgative power” and was written as self-therapy, in the hopes the Michigan-born writer from a strict Calvinist family could “keep that man distant, and to prevent becoming like him.”

But Taxi Driver isn’t just male angst. It is a lush, sumptuous affair thanks in no small part to cinematographer Michael Chapman and, especially, the legendary composer Herrmann, who had worked with Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, and was a bit cantankerous by that point in his career.

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“He kept quitting the picture,” Phillips said with a sigh, explaining how, during a conducting session, he kept knocking his wrist into a gooseneck lamp. “Instead of moving the lamp, he kept doing it, and getting enraged, and even quit temporarily because of it.”

Scorsese also had to fight to include the Jackson Browne song “Late for the Sky” during one scene. “The only music in a Bernard Herrmann film is Bernard Herrmann’s!” Phillips recalled the conductor shouting. The night after finishing work on the film, Herrmann died at the age of 64.

Jodie Foster, whose mother fought for her to play the 12-and-a-half-year-old prostitute, remarked that the climactic shootout wasn’t tense, but exhilarating and fun. Unbeknownst to her, the on-set representative for child labor was pushing Scorsese with a ticking clock to get Foster wrapped that day. “We’d been planning for a year—took months removing the ceiling from a condemned building—and we only had 20 minutes!”

Sheepishly, Foster apologized. “It’s O.K., we got it in two takes!” the director laughed.

As the crowd exited, a checkered cab was parked along Broadway. Even after a two-hour tone poem on the sick, venal, morally and economically bankrupt New York City of the 1970s, the relic’s vintage cool drew a few camera-phone wielding moviegoers.